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To fall in love with him is a gradual thing, but you didn’t start at zero. His soul and his fire and his humanity brand your grace more permanently than any mark you left on his skin. Hester, it turns out, had been correct. When you first laid a hand on Dean Winchester, you were lost.
But oh, you were found.
He is an irreverent creature, brash and angry and loud. Especially at first, before he trusts you, before he lets you see all the broken parts of him. Hell has shattered him far more than his brother realizes, far more than you in your angelic glory can comprehend at the time. Everything about him is violently human, from the bravado to the fierce protection of those that he loves.
Heaven takes note of your change before you consciously realize it is happening. You are beholden to him, they say, and it hurts. He is nothing, they say, and they are wrong.
They do all that they can to wrest him from your grip, from the feelings you were never meant to have.
They fail.
The first time he cries in front of you, he lies, bloodied and broken in a hospital bed, and begs you to change his destiny.
You cannot, and you hate yourself for it. Angels were never meant to be self-loathing. In this, Dean has changed you. The suddenness of the feeling takes the breath you don’t need away. It isn’t Dean’s fault, you realize swiftly on the heels of the emotion, but rather it is Heaven and the angels that have made you this way. But it is because of Dean. It is always because of Dean.
**
“Don’t ever change”
Too late.
He looks at you, green eyes softer than you’ve ever seen them, and something within you shifts, evolves. Even as he implores you to stay the same, you can feel yourself alter, become something more emotive, something more human, something more.
**
“I could go with you.”
You are sending him to his death, and it is tearing you apart. He holds you close, gripping you tight as he marches once again towards perdition, and for a second, for one shining moment, you are going to tell him everything, beg him to stay, be here, be with you. You want to tell him he is precious.
He is treasured.
He is home.
He leaves. You do not follow.
**
“I love you. I love all of you.”
As they leave your lips, the words are a balm on your soul, and they burn you. They have been aching to break free for some time now, begging to be acknowledged and be known.
The words are not for Dean alone. You love Sam, and you love Mary, love both of them with all that you are. They are your family.
But oh, Dean. Dean is your heart, the essence that thrums through your very existence.
He doesn’t realize, perhaps, the truth of this. He does not respond to your confession, and you pretend that it doesn’t hurt more deeply than the wound on your side.
**
There are moments, miniscule snippets of time where you think he might return your feelings.
(He does.)
When his eyes catch yours and stay there, locked as if in their own gravitational pull.
When he stands too close to you, orienting himself around you, breaking you wide open over and over.
When he touches you- oh, when he touches you- and all of creation stands still. The accidental-on-purpose brush of knuckles against yours, the knock of your knees in a booth of a grungy Oklahoma diner.
The hugs.
His hands, callous and care-worn, which cup your face like it is precious.
Like you are precious.
**
“Why does that something always seem to be you?”
When you fell, your wings burned. Your grace was torn from within you, and it is said in Heaven that there is no greater pain for an angel. None of these angels had ever loved.
Perhaps they were lucky.
The door to the bunker shuts behind you, the echo of the metal hollow as the chasm in your chest, and you think that you would do anything, anything to stop feeling like this.
In the years since you met the Winchesters, you’ve seen many movies, read books, seen so many examples of heartbreak. Of knowing that the person you cherish most in creation doesn’t love you back.
You never thought it could hurt quite like this.
**
Dean’s prayer comes to you as you behead the last of the Leviathan. His words are broken and desperate, and you collapse against a tree, overwhelmed.
He begs for forgiveness and redemption, and grants it to you in staccato sentences that leave you breathless. He bares a tiny, precious piece of his soul to you and as before, as it has always been, you are lost.
You are his.
**
“You came off the line with a crack in your chassis.”
Over the years, you have spent countless hours watching Dean work on his cars, explaining the process to you, regardless of whether you knew what he was talking about.
You should know, then, that the chassis is an integral part of the car, a system that forms the heart of the automobile.
Your heart, Castiel, your capacity for love will never be your downfall. Dean Winchester forged your heart in love; there are no cracks there.
You are whole.
You are exactly as you are meant to be.
**
It is a shame that you never see him when you aren’t there. When your absence is a gaping maw in his already damaged heart. When he wakes, screaming, and the image of metal glinting as it peeks out of your chest is seared into his eyelids. When he cries, begs a silent god to bring you back, because he has nowhere else to turn. When the flames of your funeral pyre are the only light in his eyes. When the anger and the loss and the love threaten to overwhelm him and he lashes out.
You would know, then, that he loves you back.
That he cannot function without you.
Your grace.
Your smile.
Your love.
You.
It’s something that he cannot admit, even to himself, because if he feels it, if he acknowledges the truth in it, he will lose you.
Because Dean Winchester loses the people he loves.
(He loses you anyway.)
You look at him, unsure if he’s crying or if you’re simply seeing him through your own tears.
(He’s crying.)
The handprint, your handprint, glistens red on his shoulder.
“Goodbye, Dean.”
It was always you.
His face is blank with shock, and he stares as you are overtaken by shadow.
You knew it was always going to end this way.
But Dean is safe. Dean is loved.
You can rest.